The 1st Page of Google for “SEO Blog”
Google’s 1st SERP (search engine results page) for the term “SEO blog” is insane. It’s one of the most dynamic first pages of Google I’ve seen in a while. Every day, the positions change, title tags change ,and the competitors get more aggressive. Lovely…, this playing field is much more fun than the ones that normally take weeks to months to even see a change.
Read MoreWriting this Post from Windows Live Writer
Long ago I mentioned how I was practicing a bulk blog posting strategy utilizing the features of Posterous. But I wasn’t a big fan of the signature link they placed on every post, everywhere and that they don’t past the SEO love in return. (profiles)
Read MoreWordPress SEO to Be a Top SEO Blog #3
The previous post in this series was regarding running my blog through the SEO Workers’ Analyzer Tool and the Website Grader Tool and discovering what points my site fell sort on. I also analyzed my blog’s theme based on keyword density. In this post just as the top sites in this industry have already done, I’ll focus on completing (most of ) the on-page WordPress SEO.
Read MoreWordPress SEO to Be a Top SEO Blog #2
I was thinking about this series, its’ goal, and what I had in mind when examining its’ title; “WordPress SEO to be a Top SEO Blog“. From how it sounds, this series is going to be about SEO tricks and WordPress optimization techniques that will boost my rankings for the term “SEO blog”, AND IT IS/WAS. But thinking back to my post like “Deep Down, You Know Why You’re Not Ranking #1” led me to believe that I have to do much more than just optimize this blog.
So the good news for the followers of this series is not only will I share tips I’ve done within this blog, I’ll also be sharing other things I’ll have to do in order to compete in this saturated SEO blogsphere; which most likely will have nothing to do with WordPress at all.
Just keep that in mind.
So for my 2nd couple of hours..
Earlier I wrote a post on 2 free tools you can use to analyze your website. So I figured while I’m at it, I’d run my blog through these tools and make all the necessary adjustments to improve my scores and search engine friendliness.
First I ran the tool through the infamous websitegrader. You can view my report here. But my scores (prior to this post) are below.
| Section | jameseo.com |
|---|---|
| Website Grade | 97.7 |
| Moz Rank | 4 |
| Google Indexed Pages | 240 |
| Traffic Rank | 248,714 |
| Blog Grade | 68 |
| Inbound Links | 1,581 |
| del.icio.us Bookmarks | 11 |
Here are the points I missed;
- 3 most recent articles weren’t retweeted..
- 2 images without alt tags were found
- page title of the homepage is too long – 73, 70 is recommendation
- no meta descriptions in my 3 pages; about, contact & services.
Next I ran my blog through the SEO Workers analyzer tool.
I pretty much passed on all the basic and techy stuff. But here were some factors I wanted to address/keep in mind..
The phrase “SEO Blog”;
- Domain Keyword Density
- Homepage Keyword Density
- Site Keyword Prominence
- Main Keyword Theme of Site
In one of the sections of the analyzer tool results, it points out your top single keywords, 2-word keyphrases, and 3-word keyphrases.
I know I’m going old school here, but ceteris paribus..
Single Keywords: ["SEO" & "Blog" should be #1 & #2, if "SEO Blog" is my target term]
- seo – 35 – 3.02%
- blog – 14 – 1.21%
- 2008 – 11 – 0.95%
- http – 10 – 0.86%
- san – 10 – 0.86%
- james+harrison – 10 – 0.86%
- jameseo.com – 10 – 0.86%
- diego – 10 – 0.86%
- comments – 9 – 0.78%
- google – 9 – 0.78%
- 2009 – 9 – 0.78%
Check
Two Word Keyphrases: ["SEO Blog" should be 1st on the list]
- san diego – 10 – 0.86% <— My Hometown
- http jameseo.com – 10 – 0.86%
- comments http – 9 – 0.78%
- seo blog – 7 – 0.60%
- diego seo – 6 – 0.52%
- jan 10 – 6 – 0.52% -
- search engine – 5 – 0.43%
- dec 09 – 4 – 0.34%
- engine optimization – 4 – 0.34%
- internet marketing – 4 – 0.34%
Looks like I’m going to have to write the phrase “SEO blog” everywhere I see “San Diego” or match the amount in other places witin the site. I pretty much just have to say “SEO Blog” 4 more times. I’ll also have to cut back on whatever it is I’m doing to show “comments http” 9 times. Same with “http jameseo com”.
Three Word Keyphrases: ["SEO" & "Blog" should be in the 1st one or within the 1st 2 combined
- comments http jameseo.com - 9 - 0.78%
- san diego seo - 6 - 0.52%
- search engine optimization - 3 - 0.26%
- diego seo freelancer - 3 - 0.26%
- recognizes san diego - 2 - 0.17%
- website isn’t ranking - 2 - 0.17%
- awesome browser icon - 2 - 0.17%
- professional seo specialists - 2 - 0.17%
- reporter recognizes san - 2 - 0.17%
- james+harrison 30 jan - 2 - 0.17%
Obviously, I have some work to do. But maybe as I filter out "comments http" and "http jameseo com", and switch "search engine optimization" with "SEO", the phrase "SEO blog" will show up on the list.
URLs found in the page
This section lists the URLs found within the page, and the number of times each was found.
Found 78 urls of which 62 are unique.
Ideally, if your homepage is you main page going after your main keyword, then that page should have the most internal links pointing back to it. Always point more links saying your desired keywords to the most important pages within your site/blog.
The pages listed below should be listed in the same order as your 'page importance order'. So, I either have to add another site-wide link pointing to the JameSEO.com homepage or get rid of one of the sets of pages links (either in the top nav or sidebar).
- http://jameseo.com/services/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/blog/blog-optimization/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/about-james-harrison/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/blog/san-diego/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/deep-down-you-know-why-your-website-isnt-ranking-1/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/essential-accounts-for-online-marketers/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/a-san-diego-seo-freelancer-thats-me/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/wordpress-seo-to-be-a-top-seo-blog/ – 2
- http://jameseo.com/feed/ – 2
This post will be continued tomorrow, when I will discuss my fixes and optimization techniques based on my Google Webmaster Tools & Bing’s Webmaster Center finding. Stay Tuned!
Read MorePlugins I Installed for WordPress SEO-Blog Optimization
Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog.
HeadSpace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, style sheets, and many many other goodies.
Post Teaser – Post Teaser generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. It includes features to generate a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.
OR
Limit Posts – Limits the displayed text length on the index page entries and generates a link to a page to read the full content if its bigger than the selected maximum length.
Recent Posts – Returns a list of the most recent posts.
Redirection – Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors
SEO Title Tag – Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags. Create a customized title tag for any post, static page, category page, UltimateTagWarrior tag page – indeed, any URL! And will auto-insert the tag name into the title on tag pages generated by Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. Admin allows for mass editing of title tags.
WordPress SEO Pager – An SEO-enhanced pagination control for WordPress.
Advanced Permalinks – Allows multiple permalink structures, migration of permalinks without redirections, permalinks for posts in specific categories, and categories without a base
FeedWordPress - Simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication for WordPress
SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.
SEO Smart Links -SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
Other Worpress Plug-ins that Have Nothing to do with SEO
WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Navigate to Tools → Backup to get started. (You don’t really need this one if you use GoDaddy or BlueHost backup or if you have the latest WordPress Installation)
Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. Visit Options/Recent Comments after activation of the plugin.
Gravatar – This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. See the documentation for syntax and usage.
WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. WP Super Cache must be configured. Go to the admin page to enable and configure the plugin.
Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.
Cookies for Comments – Sets a cookie that must exist for a comment to be allowed through
Lifestream – Displays your activity from various social networks. (Requires PHP 5 and MySQL 5)
Ping Crawl – Every time you make a post on your blog it grabs similar posts from other blogs that allow pingbacks using the post tags. It then links to them at the bottom of the post as similar posts. It then executes the pingback on all the posts. You can specify how many posts to do per tag and that many will be done for each tag you use in your posts. Typically it has about an 80% success rate with each ping back and they are legit so the ones that fall into moderation tend to get approved. This creates quite a few deep links for each blog post you make and through time really helps with your link building. Especially for new blogs.
I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my SEO blog. I really do appreciate it. You can read another related post (found below) or subscribe here. Once again, thank you for visiting James’ SEO blog.
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